The Car Cross

My latest confession is a simple one:
I will come back from the dead and haunt you if you put a cross on the spot where I die.  I'm not kidding here. I have a serious aversion the the roadside cross and constantly pray that I never ever die in an auto accident just for this reason. Let me get hit by a train or subway, crash in an airplane into a watery grave, but I never ever want to die on a roadside where some do-gooder can stake a cross in my "loving" memory.

I always believed this tidbit about myself to be an obscure fact not even remotely worth mentioning to family or friends until, to my absolute horror, my brother and his wife actually placed a cross on the side of their driveway. [cue scary shrieking music from your favorite horror movie.]

And while it may have been put there as a joke, because my niece recently and most perilously drove her car off the family's driveway and perched it like a teeter totter over the edge of the ditch---joke or not, I was alarmed that marking ANY tragic site with a roadside cross could become habit-forming.  When I made the ghastly discovery on their driveway my heart stopped. I knew right then and there that I had to teach the whole of my extended family not to ever ever do this again.

That's when I commenced "Operation Cross-Examine"

It began the day I saw the offending object. I stopped my car, tore the vanilla-scented air freshener tree off my rear-view mirror and added it to the cross:

There and then I decided to make weekly pilgrimages to the marker and leave motley mementos until the thing reached the pinnacle of tacky.

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

NOTE: If anyone out there has a dashboard hula girl, send her my way.  There a little scarce in these parts, but she'd be a beauty perched by the dice!


And then finally, I left a poem:

You had but only four wheels

To keep yourself upright

Until a certain teen-aged girl

tried to back you up one night.

Reversing under the cloak of dark 

--such is a teenage fodder

she backed your wheels right off the ledge

and made you a teeter-totter.

This little cross that marks the spot

of that dark and horrible night

It scares me that you'll mark mine too

should I meet with a terrible plight.

So if I die an early death

just leave well enough alone.

A tacky little roadside cross

will surely make me moan.

So for the record, let me set it strait,

a tip for you from me:

If you dare to mark my spot of death

I'll haunt you eternally.

Love, Aunt Stacy

And while we're on the subject.  I don't want anyone to dedicate their car to my memory either.  You know, you've seen those stickers that say "In loving memory of so-and-so" on the back windshield of certain cars.  That sort of stunt will get you haunted for life as well. Especially since most members of my family own cars that are less than desirable when it comes to having my "loving" memory dedicated to.

Can you just see it? On the back windshield of my sister-in-law's forest green 15-passenger van:

"In loving memory of my Aunt Stacy." 

Surely not the hallmarks of one's life.